The best of Ricky Ponting

Ricky Ponting always talked like he made runs, in torrents. Then the runs dried up, and on Thursday, so did the words, almost. First when addressing the team, then at a media conference a few hours later, Ponting had to force himself as he rarely did in his strokeplay.

But the import was plain: for one of Australia's greatest batsmen, it would be over as soon as the Perth Test was. Ponting barely held back a flow of tears. Michael Clarke, his successor and protege, but from a different generation, did not bother to try.

Three times in the last two years, Ponting's cataract of runs had contracted to a trickle. The first time, coinciding with a heavy Ashes defeat, it was shell shock, and it led to renouncement of the captaincy. The second time, it was because of a technical kink, blinding him on leg stump. By sheer hard work, a motif in his career, he corrected it.

This time, exemplified more by his second innings dismissal in Adelaide than the first, it is because he is seeing the ball late. It was much the same for David Boon, for Steve Waugh, for Mark Taylor. ''Played on'' is the symptom. There is no cure, and no comeback, only a hope that the nation's adrenalin, telepathically infused, can obviate it one last time.

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This much, Ponting said on Thursday, he had come to see clearly. Even on his own exacting terms, he could not have been better prepared entering this series, and still the runs would not come. In Adelaide, he admitted to himself that they never would again, not at the rate he wanted and Australia needed.

If Ponting did his decline harder than most, it was understandable. Effectively, he was giving up the job that he, uniquely in Australia's annals, was trained for from birth. As a child, he revealed recently, he would study the Mowbray first XI and try on their batting gloves. At 14, he had a bat contract and was almost picked for Tasmania. At 17, he was.

At 18, cricket academy coach Rod Marsh said he was the best teenage batsman he had seen, better even than Doug Walters. By then, blessedly, Australia had given up on ''next Bradmans''. At 20, he played for Australia. At all but 38, he still is.

But Ponting never took his privilege for granted. His work ethic is legendary. He has always been as lean as the greyhounds he once raced for a hobby. As a fieldsman, he had Jonty Rhodes's athleticism and Mark Taylor's hands.

He was not without blemish; which public figure is? He was sometimes immature off the field in his early years, and sometimes indecorous on it later. But his career average for good grace stands up. Unusually for one so long-lived, never to my knowledge did he divide the Australian dressing room, nor find himself unwelcome in another's.

None of this would matter if he was not, simply, Australia's supreme batsman in a supreme era, with Neil Harvey and Greg Chappell one of the best three since Bradman (there, the Pandora's box is open). All great batsmen have their own styles. Ponting's was to pounce on the ball like a cat on a hapless mouse. So would he force through cover, or drive down the ground, or pull imperiously for four, deliveries that looked to have not much wrong with them. In his pomp, he would do this for days at a time, as Clarke does now, tipping the scales in Test after Test.

Ponting asked on Thursday that we stay the toasts while he negotiated one last Test, but for the best-of list, here's a starting point: back-to-back double centuries against India in 2003. In the fullness of time, it is this regal Ponting who will live on in the mind's eye, not the toiler of the last month, and justly so.

Born to cricket, Ponting loved everything about it: the net sessions, the touring life, the brotherhood, the talk, the joining and rejoining of battle. In this team, he is, as well as a batsman, mentor to Clarke, de facto coach to off-spinner Nathan Lyon, consultant to all the batsmen.

As he will miss them, so they will miss him, Clarke particularly. For one thing, he will almost certainly have to move up to No.4. For another, he is on his own now. Though already a better intuitive captain than Ponting, still he defers to his predecessor. His sorrow on Thursday was heartfelt.

Sportsmen say you know when your time has come, but not all do. To watch Ponting in the nets was to know that his satisfaction in hitting a cricket ball well has not dulled, nor his belief that he might hit it better yet. Briefly, perhaps, this undying love blinded him. But not many great sportspeople are sentimental in their time, because sentimentality tends to fog the mind.

At the end, Ponting was clear-eyed. Asked if it had been tough to forsake a previously stated ambition to make one last Ashes tour next year, Ponting was again his old direct, unhesitating, peremptory self.

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